Unsettling India
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acknowledgments Th is book has been a long time in the making and has, along the way, gath- ered a number of debts. I would like, fi rst of all, to thank my in for mants in New Delhi and the San Francisco Bay Area for their generosity and pa- tience: so many of them met with me repeatedly for over a de cade and shared their insights, experiences, anxieties, and aspirations. Expressing one’s sense of unsettlement is never an easy or comfortable experience and, in doing so, my in for mants, some of whom became friends over the years, also shared their sense of vulnerability. I have learned much from them. Th ey provided me with many examples of how the aff ects that suf- fuse longings, dreams, anxieties, and fears are generative of agency and of subjectivity. Like others before them, these in for mants reminded me of the ways in which coping with the temporalities of everyday life, of learn- ing to make do, of yearning and despairing, of struggling to change one’s circumstances, of losing and then regaining hope all represent modes of making sense of one’s life that are also modes of theorizing one’s place in the world. Th is, then, has become an objective of all my ethnographic work: to bring, with deep humility, my in for mants’ modes of theorizing into conversation with conceptual frameworks that I have developed as a feminist anthropologist, a scholar of media and public cultures, and a stu- dent of the transnational and the global. I must also thank the institutions that provided support for the re- search and writing of this book. My very fi rst forays into researching this book were enabled by a seed grant from the South Asia Initiative at Stan- ford University. Th e conceptualization and initial writing of this book were supported by a fellowship at the Radcliff e Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard University. My colleagues at the Radcliff e, chiefl y, Rita Brock, Cynthia Enloe, Dhooleka Raj, Francesca Sawaya and Vicki Schulz patiently read and listened to iterations of papers that were later to become chapters. At Harvard, Michael and Nea Herzfeld, Charles Hirschkind, Engseng Ho,